THE STUBBORN STRENGTH OF YITZHAK SHAMIR

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AFULA, IN NORTHERN ISRAEL, IS a drab industrial town that some Israelis compare to Toledo, Ohio.

Nothing much happens here, unless some dignitary passes through, as happened one day in May. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir swung by for a visit he did not call a campaign visit, although clearly it was. The Prime Minister, who is 72 years old, is running for a third term in the November Parliamentary elections.

At Afula's high school, the auditorium was packed, a student orchestra played and the Mayor gave the Prime Minister a shiny plaque naming him an honorary citizen. It was the sort of ceremony most politicians feel they have to endure. But afterward, driving back to his helicopter on the edge of town, Shamir, who seldom shows much emotion, was aglow with pleasure.

Earlier that day, Shamir attended a party meeting at the home of a local leader of the Herut, the party he heads. For more than an hour, party stalwarts - ecstatic over public-opinion polls showing that Israelis were making a decided turn to the right - stood and declaimed their fealty to the Prime Minister, who was seated on a sofa in the living room.

''We need to stand strong against our enemies, and our people know they can rely on you for that,'' intoned one aspiring candidate for the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. ''With your leadership, there is no doubt we will be victorious in the fall,'' said another, arms reaching toward him across the room.

But as he sat on the sofa - shoulders hunched forward, eyes fixed on his shoes - Shamir seemed oblivious to all the adulation. Looking pained, he neither smiled nor acknowledged the words addressed to him. As the tributes swelled, he shrank back into the cushions.

Later, Shamir explains: ''I like all those people, they're nice people. But it's not my style, not my language. This kind of meeting is the modern picture, but I don't belong to it.'' In the United States, he knows, a man like him probably couldn't be elected to the Poughkeepsie school board.

''Let's face it,'' says one of his best friends, ''he's not a born leader.''

Still, the way things stand today, Yitzhak Shamir -uncharismatic, secretive, suspicious, introverted -holds a better than even chance of winning a third term. A compromise candidate for the post of Prime Minister when Menachem Begin suddenly retired in 1983, Shamir has proved to be a far more enduring politician than many would have thought possible. Begin's Likud, a conservative bloc that includes the Herut Party, first defeated the Labor Party in 1977; if Likud takes power this fall and Shamir serves out the customary four-year term, he will have led Israel longer than any Prime Minister except David Ben-Gurion.

Unlike Americans, Israelis vote more for political parties than for individual candidates. Personality is not as decisive a factor, although that is beginning to change. And right now, the opinion polls show a steady drift toward Likud, toward Shamir. The latest Hanoch Smith Research Center survey (''a very reliable poll,'' says Yossi Beilin, who manages polling operations for the Labor Party) shows a continuing slip in support for Labor and a rise for Likud.

No one can say for certain why voters are turning to the right. But as long as the Palestinian uprising continues, many Israelis will be inclined to vote for the party that takes a tough stand against the Arabs. And that is Likud. King Hussein's decision last month to sever his ties with the West Bank - in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization's claim to represent the Palestinian people - can only push more voters into the Likud camp.

Late last year, before the uprising began, 36 percent of Israelis said they would vote for Labor and 26 percent for Likud. By March of this year, the percentage breakdown was 35, Labor; 30, Likud. The latest poll shows the two parties in a dead tie: 33.5 percent each. In previous elections over the last decade, Likud has been the underdog - only to surge toward the end.

Nonetheless, Israelis say only a fool would dare bet money now on the composition of the next government. With neither Labor, headed by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, nor Likud holding enough of a majority in the Knesset since the 1984 elections, Israel has a coalition Government. This, of course, could change in November. No matter what the polls say or the strategists suggest, Israel is a nation of such volatile emotional swings that something unexpected in late October - a terrorist act or even a hint of an Arab move toward peace - could easily shift voters en masse to Shamir or to his opponent, Peres.

Whoever wins will preside over a pivotal period in his nation's history. As much as anything else, the election this November is a referendum on what Israel should do with its occupied territories and the 1.5 million Palestinian residents who are now in their ninth month of revolt.

Whatever Israel decides to do - annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip, give them up or maintain the status quo - nearly all Israelis agree that the fundamental character of this nation is likely to change. ''There's no easy way out,'' says Yosef Ben-Aharon, Shamir's chief of staff. ''We'll pay a price, undergo change, no matter what course we take.''

If Shamir remains in power, change would likely come not because of him but in spite of him. He is the candidate of the status quo. But even leaving things just as they are would almost certainly bring painful change. Most experts here don't expect the Palestinian uprising to end of its own volition, and if the deportations, demolitions of homes and deaths among demonstrators continue, Israel's self-image and its standing in the world are almost certain to suffer.

Already, at least one major public-opinion poll shows support for Israel slipping in the United States. If support continues to drop, that could jeopardize Israel's close relationship with the United States - which funnels $3 billion a year into Israel's treasury with few strings attached - and damage its relations with other countries as well. There are economic effects, too. Trade and tourism, for example, are hurting.

In the meantime, the candidate of the status quo believes that Israel's ''days without Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone and will not return. No one will deviate me from my course.''

At a lunch for him in Afula's ''Paradise'' wedding hall, the town rabbi offered this benediction: ''I hope God will help the Prime Minister continue to stand strong against all pressures.'' Many in the room nodded their approval.

HE IS A SHORT, STOCKY MAN. OFTEN, HIS shirtsleeves are too long. He is not blessed with a sharp wit, a soothing public manner or an engaging oratorical style. During interviews, he is at times calm, relaxed, smiling, speaking with seeming ease, although he rarely laughs. More often, he is stiff and clearly uncomfortable, answering most questions with an air of weary wisdom, as if to say, ''This is so clear. Why do you even ask?''

But Yitzhak Shamir is determined. Strong. Some say stubborn. Just ask anyone in the United States State Department. To win support for his Middle East peace plan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz has traveled repeatedly to Israel. He made private entreaties to the Prime Minister and even openly criticized him. But the Prime Minister - knowing that Israel is critically dependent on the United States for political and economic assistance - has not yielded an inch.

''The United States,'' Shamir confidently maintains, ''is our best friend, and our relations are excellent. Our relations will be strengthened even more, despite our differences in views.'' But a member of Shultz's staff says, ''He thinks that because nobody got up on the table and kicked his teeth in that we're all happy, and everything's O.K.''

Shamir's media adviser, Avi Pazner, offers a digest of the conventional wisdom on his boss. ''What you see is what there is,'' he says. ''Nothing's hidden, that's the man. He's patient, very strong-willed. If he wants something, it may take a long time but he'll never let go.''

A senior minister in the Likud Government, not one of Shamir's friends, says: ''He sees himself as the last soldier the country can depend on. While everyone else is in disarray, he'll be the last man standing on the wall, sword in hand, keeping everything secure.''

Many of Shamir's friends and colleagues ascribe his basic character to his years in the Jewish underground - years when he sent men out to kill and showed himself in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi. He was a wanted man then. To the British, he was a terrorist, an assassin.

His wife, Shulamit, once said that in the underground they both learned not to talk about their political work, a rule they still follow today. ''He's not quick to strike up a chemistry with people,'' a senior advisor says. ''His years in the underground made him cautious, suspicious .''

Avi Pazner remembers with distress Shamir's first major press conference in the United States, at the Capitol Hilton in Washington several years ago. Whatever the question, Pazner recalls, ''he had one of three answers: Yes, No or No Comment.'' The press conference was over in five minutes.

Yet the man with the iron facade has, on a few rare occasions, allowed his composure to crack. Once, a few years ago, Yosef Ben-Aharon, Shamir's chief of staff, recalls with wonder, the Prime Minister gave a speech in Buenos Aires to several thousand Jews, most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. ''He was recounting the story of Jewish history in Europe, speaking in Yiddish. The audience understood Yiddish. They empathized, understood. Tears began streaming down his face, but he went right on talking.''

BORN IN EASTERN POLAND IN 1915 to Shlomo and Penina Jazernicki (or Yezernitsky, depending on the transliteration used), Yitzhak immigrated to Palestine when he was 20, selecting Shamir as his Hebrew surname. The word means ''thorn,'' ''thistle'' or ''sharp point.''

At first, Shamir worked as a bookkeeper and construction worker. But after Arab attacks against Jewish settlers and the British in 1936 -Palestine had been under British control since 1923 -Shamir joined the Irgun, the underground Jewish defense league. In 1940, the Irgun's most militant members split away and formed the Lehi, or ''Stern Gang,'' named for its first leader, Abraham Stern.

After British police killed Stern in 1942, Shamir became one of the Lehi's three (Continued on Page 68) top commanders. Under his leadership, the group undertook a campaign of ''personal terror,'' assassinating top British military and government officers, often gunning them down in the street.

To the Jewish public, and even to the other Jewish underground groups, Shamir's gang was ''lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience,'' Israel Rokach, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944, after Stern Gang gunmen shot down three British policemen on the streets of his city.

Years later, Shamir told an interviewer that, in his view, it was more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as the other underground groups did. Besides, he once said, ''a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing - that by his act he will change the course of history.''

Ironically, it was a guerrilla act by the Lehi's chief rival, the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin, that got Shamir in trouble. In 1946, Irgun guerrillas bombed the King David Hotel; a total of 91 people were killed, including British citizens, Jews and Arabs.

The British immediately traced the bombers to Tel Aviv, surrounded the city and led Jews one by one to a British police headquarters for identification. Eventually, it came to be Shamir's turn. He wore a beard and his Hasidic rabbi's outfit. But when Shamir saw Sgt. T. G. Martin, a fearsome detective whom he recognized from a photograph he had seen in Stern Gang files, he knew he was in trouble.

Sergeant Martin took one look at the bearded rabbi and said, ''You are Jazernicki.'' Shamir's bushy eyebrows had given him away. He was arrested and deported to a detention camp in Eritrea. Less than a month later, Lehi assassins shot and killed Sergeant Martin as he played tennis in Haifa. Shamir was in Eritrea then, so ''of course, I was not consulted about the decision to kill Martin,'' he recalls. ''But if I had been, I would have approved it. He had a special talent to recognize people. He posed a danger to the underground.''

Last June, about 50 aging but stiff-backed British policemen, members of the Palestine Police Old Comrades Association, returned to Jerusalem for a 10-day visit. They stayed at a hotel in Arab East Jerusalem and spoke to the staff in rusty but functional Arabic. As they reminisced about their service there during the 1940's, their memories of Yitzhak Shamir were something less than fond.

''One hundred and twenty-one of our men died at the hands of people who were killers without any feelings whatsoever,'' said Sidney Johnson, one of the former Palestine Police. ''Even today we have strong feelings and differentiate between the Haganah,'' the large and comparatively restrained Jewish defense organization, ''and the criminal intent of the Irgun and the Stern Gang groups.''

Was Yitzhak Shamir a terrorist? ''Yes,'' Johnson said, ''to the British Government. But to the Jews, the Stern Gang were freedom fighters. But that is the same as the P.L.O., who are terrorists to the Israelis and freedom fighters to the Arabs.''

Shamir didn't meet any of the former British police while they were in town. But before they left, he gave a speech to a group of Israeli police who were preparing to deal with the latest threats of violence from the Palestinian protestors.

''These terrorist threats should be an incentive to the Israeli police to make a special effort to repel every attack and to amputate every hand that will be raised against us,'' the Prime Minister said.

What is the difference? Were Shamir and other members of the Stern Gang, struggling for a Jewish state, a group of freedom fighters? Are the Palestinians, now fighting for their own state, terrorists? It's a paradox Shamir says he has been asked about ''many, many times. It's understandable that people should put this question.''

When Shamir first became a public figure, some in the Israeli press referred to him as ''the little terrorist.'' ''I'm called a terrorist in the Arab media still today,'' he says. But, as he explains it, ''There are two big differences between what I did, I and my friends did, and what the Arabs are doing now.

''First of all, our aim was to establish a Jewish state where there was no state, not to destroy an existing state. The main aim of the Palestinians is to destroy the state of Israel.

''They have Arab countries, more than 20 of them. They have enough. This is the only Jewish state. And second, our methods were different. We fought against the armed forces and the leaders of the British Government. But we never attacked civilians, women and children. Never did. And there was no hatred. The driving force for the Arabs is hatred of Israel. Hatred of the Jewish people. Look, we defend ourselves now. But we don't hate the Arabs.''

Shamir is a tactician. He's not a man of volatile emotions, subject to such dangerous feelings as hate.

SITTING IN A STREETSIDE cafe in downtown Sderot on the edge of the Negev desert a few weeks ago, Mordechai Azzan, a gardener in his mid-40's, said he and his friends would vote for Likud, for Shamir, because ''The Arabs don't want peace. They want Haifa and Jaffa and all of Israel. I don't know one Arab leader who wants peace. They want an end to the Jews.'' That is a line Yitzhak Shamir repeats tirelessly. When forest fires ravaged parts of the country last spring, and some were thought to have been started by Palestinian arsonists, Shamir said: ''The fires prove a primitive hate, deep and inhumane, that the Arabs feel for the Jews and cannot get over.''

Shamir's friends say this is not just rhetoric. He genuinely believes, as do many other Israelis, that the Arabs want nothing less than to push every Jew into the sea, so trying to make peace with them is a foolish enterprise.

''The main thing about this guy is he's so suspicions,'' says Yossi Beilin of the Labor Party. ''He doesn't believe the Arabs. He doesn't believe there can be peace with them.''

All of this means that in a country where ''every day in the morning we have a new drama,'' as Uri Gordon, a senior government officer, puts it, Shamir is a stable, careful and predictable leader. Half the country may abhor his politics, but everyone knows where he stands.

As Prime Minister, he makes no startling pronouncements. He offers no startling initiatives, and he's slow to endorse or assail proposals put forward by others. As Shamir explains it: ''With our long, bitter experience, we have to think twice before we do something.'' No sharp turns. No rude surprises.

Eight years ago, few people could have guessed that Yitzhak Shamir would still be a serious contender for Prime Minister today. That year, according to Aryeh Naor, who was a senior adviser in Prime Minister Menachem Begin's office until 1982, Begin chose Shamir to be Foreign Minister after two other candidates had turned down the job.

Yechiel Kadishai, chief of the Prime Minister's office under Begin, recalls that Shamir, then Speaker of the Knesset, was chosen because Begin no longer wanted or needed a powerful figure high in his Cabinet.

''Begin had already established himself,'' Kadishai adds. ''When he first came to office, he needed strong people under him,'' like his first Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan. But by 1980, he wanted no competitors for power and selected Shamir because ''he was not so known in political circles. The furrows were already plowed. He didn't want someone who would jump the plow out of the furrows.''

When Begin retired unexpectedly in late 1983, Shamir was designated the successor largely by virtue of his position in the Foreign Ministry. ''He was a compromise candidate,'' says Shamir's chief of staff, Yosef Ben-Aharon.

''We all thought he would lose the election,'' a senior Likud member of the Knesset remembers. Even after Shamir took office, many saw the low-key, colorless man as an interim leader, especially since he was inevitably compared with his charismatic predecessor.

Although their backgrounds were similar, in some ways Shamir seemed a pale copy of Begin, who was a magnetic leader for the right and a captivating public speaker. Begin had been the Herut Party's unquestioned leader since its inception in 1948. Shamir, on the other hand, cannot control his party to any great degree even now.

Nevertheless, Shamir did grow into his new job; he read a lot and even today often stays up to midnight poring over reports and intelligence documents. Ben-Aharon recalls watching his boss read Henry Kissinger's memoirs several years ago. His English wasn't so good then, and ''he read with a tattered Hebrew-English dictionary in his other hand, looking up everything he couldn't understand.''

Since 1984, Shamir has also learned to maneuver his way around a ''national unity'' coalition Government. In Israel, each of the ministries has its own powers and authorities; in many instances, each ministry can work with almost complete autonomy. The major officers of the present Government, including Prime Minister Shamir (Likud), Foreign Minister Peres (Labor) and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Labor), hold a Cabinet meeting once or twice a week. The three men (dubbed ''the Prime Minister's Club'' by the Israeli news media, since each of them has held the post) meet by themselves on occasion, too. But on cross-agency issues - particularly when it comes to negotiating for peace - there is often a deadlock. Nothing gets done. There is no love lost between Shamir and Peres. ''They talk when they have to,'' an aide to Shamir says. Shamir and Rabin are said to get along well enough, though they are not friends.

It is undeniable that Shamir has remained at the head of his party all these years partly because there has been no obvious successor. His chief rivals are Ariel Sharon, the former Defense Minister, and Deputy Prime Minister David Levy. Sharon has a high negative rating among voters because he directed the controversial Lebanon war, and because many see him as an extremist. In many quarters, Levy is regarded as temperamental and immature. The two battle for pre-eminence, making Shamir the logical compromise.

Asked about his rivals, Shamir says simply, ''I was elected. I have nothing against the people who did not win.'' But he has been forced to look continually over his shoulder at Sharon, wary that if he strays too far from Likud's hardline, Sharon will jump into his place.

It would, of course, be incorrect to say that infighting alone has kept Shamir in power. As party leader, he has become the symbol of what many Israelis want: A tough, no-compromise line against the Arabs. The Likud portfolio Shamir now holds comes with its own natural constituency, including about 70 percent of the nation's Sephardic population, as well as West bank settlers and their supporters, other hardliners and, of late, many religious voters.

DESPITE HIS OWN political ambitions, Ariel Sharon says he hopes Shamir continues in power ''until he's 120 years old.'' Still, he offers this backhanded description of a striking Shamir trait, mentioned by friends and opponents alike.

''If I hear a noise in the other room,'' Sharon says, ''I'm going to get up, open the door, look and see what the problem is. But if he hears a noise in the other room, he'll get up and close the door. Better to let somebody else take care of it.''

Nahum Barnea, editor of the Israeli weekly news magazine Koteret Rasheet, says Shamir ''doesn't just close the door. If something's going wrong, he puts his fingers in his ears and pretends he doesn't hear.''

Nonsense, Shamir says. ''It's just a political argument. I am a very good observer and a very good listener. I listen to everything.''

Perhaps, his closest adviser says, ''if he hears a noise in the other room, maybe he doesn't get up right away. He waits to see: Is it a terrorist with a bomb - or is it just the cleaning lady?''

Any Israeli trying to explain what that is all about will refer to the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut on Sept. 16, 1982. That Thursday evening, Phalangists - Lebanese Christian militiamen - entered the camps and began slaughtering hundreds of men, women and children while the Israeli Army, largely unaware of the killings, stood guard at the gates.

The next morning in Tel Aviv, Ze'ev Schiff, one of Israel's best-known journalists, got a call from a military official who told him there was a slaughter under way in the camps. He rushed over to the office of his friend Mordechai Zippori, the Minister of Communications and former Deputy Minister of Defense. Schiff told Zippori what he had heard, and right away the minister called Yitzhak Shamir, then the Foreign Minister.

Shamir was scheduled to meet with a group of military and intelligence officials shortly, so with some urgency Zippori told him to ask about the report he had received that the Phalangists ''are carrying out a slaughter.'' Zippori remembered the Foreign Minister's prom-ising to look into the report. But Shamir did no such thing. According to the official findings on the massacre by the Israeli Government's commission of inquiry, Shamir merely asked Foreign Ministry officers to see ''whether any new reports had arrived from Beirut.'' At the meeting of military and intelligence officials, he did not even mention Zippori's account. When the meeting ended, Shamir ''left for his home and took no additional action,'' the report said.

The Phalangists tore through the camps until Saturday night. By the end of their rampage, they had killed more than 700 people. Many were hacked to pieces or disemboweled.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin first heard of the slaughter ''on a BBC radio broadcast toward evening on Saturday,'' according to the commission report. When word spread, cries of outrage reached Israel from around the world.

Today, Shamir says, ''You know, in those times of the Lebanese war, every day something happened. And from the first glance of it, it seemed like just another detail of what was going on every day. But after 24 hours, it became clear it was not a normal event.''

Shamir was not the only Israeli official who failed to act on early information, but the commission found it ''difficult to find a justification'' for his decision not to make ''any attempt to check whether there was anything in what he heard from Minister Zippori.'' It added: ''The Foreign Minister erred.''

AT A YESHIVA ON King David Street in downtown Hebron, three dozen religious students were waiting for Prime Minister Shamir. He was visiting the ancient city to make a point: The West Bank is no less a part of the Land of Israel than Tel Aviv. As Shamir and his heavily armed escort walked up to the schoolyard, the students hopped up and down in a rhythmic sort of dance, chanting a paraphrase of a verse from the Psalms: ''Open the gates for the honor of the King! Open the gates for the honor of the King!''

Shamir seemed to bask in the moment. To the yeshiva students, who are West Bank settlers, and to many other Israelis, the Prime Minister carried one clear message: As long as he is ''the king,'' Israel will never let go of the West Bank. That, more than anything else, is the Likud-Shamir platform in the 1988 elections.

Shamir says, ''A general striving for peace is the deepest wish of our people.'' To find peace - to find a solution for the Palestinian problem - he says he wants to negotiate directly with the neighboring Arab countries. The Arab states refuse to negotiate with Israel and Shamir for a host of reasons, not the least of which is his pledge ''never to agree to'' the creation of a Palestinian state.

Jordan's severing of administrative ties to the West Bank makes direct negotiations with Israel's neighbors seem an even more unlikely possibility. So Shamir's opponents charge that his plan for peace is really a cover for what he really wants: to leave things just as they are.

The Prime Minister disputes that. ''The status quo is not the best situation,'' he says. ''I want it to change for peace. My positions are known. The Arab positions are known. I think the moment we sit down at the table, it will not be easy, but we will get an agreement. I have some ideas in my mind now. But I can't say now what they are.'' Shamir says he doesn't want to give away negotiating positions in advance. His opponents say it's an empty ploy.

A senior aide who works with Shamir on this issue says, ''We don't think it's true that the door is necessarily closed to direct negotiations -that the Arabs won't come.'' Remembering the 1977 visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he continues, ''I was there when Sadat came, at the airport. It was the most moving moment of my life. We should show a little humility. Ten days before, nobody believed Sadat would come either.''

So under the Likud-Shamir peace plan, Israel would pursue one of its favorite pastimes: Waiting for another Sadat.

Shamir's position on the occupied territories is clear. What, on the other hand, could Israel expect, if Shamir's opponent, Shimon Peres, were to lead the nation over the next four years? When that question is put to Peres, he likes to talk about his accomplishments during his two years as Prime Minister in 1985 and 1986. He says he repaired the nation's economy and ended the war in Lebanon. The Labor Party also takes credit for the hard-line approach to controlling the Palestinian uprising. That is Defense Minister Rabin's domain.

If he becomes Prime Minister, says Peres, he would expend all his energy to begin peace negotiations with the Arabs. Eventually, he would give up parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He had been saying he would give them to Jordan, but King Hussein's decision to cut his ties with the West Bank has complicated matters for Labor, too. If parts of the West Bank were given up, many Israelis believe that settlers and other right-wing Jews would react violently. Some people fear mass rioting.

Ironically, Likud seems to be getting most of the credit for Rabin's popular ''force, might and beatings'' policy against the Palestinians. Since the Labor Party is best known for its interest in peace negotiations with the Arabs, people associate the Israeli Army's uncompromising stand with the Likud, whose main tenet is a strong hand against the Arabs. But ask Shamir and his aides what they have actually accomplished, and most of them will give an answer close to that given by Eliahu Ben-Elissar. Ben-Elissar is a Likud member of the Knesset, and he says that under his party the single most important accomplishment has been ''surviving.''

''The biggest Shamir gains have been keeping Israel from falling into dangerous traps put out by Mr. Peres,'' he says. ''How can I define that as a victory for the Prime Minister, only that he has been able to overcome Mr. Peres? It's a very strange state of affairs. But I have to consider it an achievement that we have not allowed the country to be pushed into something dangerous.''

Shamir himself says that he has kept the coalition Government together and maintained economic stability. ''And I think that one of my achievements was, during the first term in my premiership, in '83 until '84, improvement of relations with the U.S. I think that is very important for our country.''

His most senior political strategist says, ''To be very frank with you, our greatest achievement has been to prevent damages by others. Unfortunately, that is true.'' WITH THE ELECTIONS LITTLE more than two months away, Yitzhak Shamir is ''riding on top of the horse,'' the newspaper Ha'aretz commented recently. He may not like crowds, but he clearly enjoys power. Just as they have in previous elections, the princes of Likud are talking about who will take the throne if Shamir finally retires after his next term.

The Prime Minister describes the next four years as ''my last cadence.'' But the princes say they have heard that one before. Pressed on the question, Shamir says, ''At the end of this term I will be 77. Maybe that's enough. But look at Armand Hammer,'' who has just visited Israel. ''He's still active on his 90th birthday. ''Is this my last time? Maybe. Maybe not.''

Joel Brinkley is The New York Times's bureau chief in Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 6, Page 26 of the National edition with the headline: THE STUBBORN STRENGTH OF YITZHAK SHAMIR. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe